Hey, it's Csaba, and welcome to the second module which is all about finding the right audiences to target. Step one is discovering the best website personalization opportunities which is what this lesson is about.
Building a personalized experience for your shoppers must start by clearly defining your goals: for whom do you want to create a better, more personalized experience?
A group of visitors that will be targeted by a personalized message is called a visitor segment.
The first step in website personalization is uncovering groups of website visitors, who share two important characteristics:
The first is that they can be targeted based on data about their shared attributes that you have available. You could have an awesome personalization idea for 18-year-olds, but if you don't know the age of your visitors, then you can't target this visitor segment (and in most cases you don't, unless you ask visitors directly how old they are).
The second important characteristic is that there's an opportunity to create a better, more personalized user experience for this segment. This also implies that there might be some issues with the current experience of this segment of users!
There are lots of ways to uncover potential issues in your visitor's experience. Let's discuss the top ones!
The first approach is data-based: have a look at your Google Analytics account. It has several reports that can help you understand the problems that visitors face while browsing your website.
You should look for visitor segments that have significantly lower conversion rates compared to other segments. These low-performing visitor groups could be segmented by source, country, content, or landing pages visited, just to name a few.
So the next best method to really understand these user issues is to ask your visitor directly. Use a personalized message, like a sidemessage or popup, to welcome your Instagram visitors and ask them what they are looking for, or what they are missing. This is the surest way to get quality feedback directly from the customers you are trying to serve!
A less revealing, but somewhat easier method, is to use heatmap and mouse tracking software, like Hotjar, to examine the customer experience from the shopper's perspective.
Often one of the greatest sources of customer insights is your customer support department. Customer support channels hear about issues directly from your customers, and pain points that customers frequently complain about are usually great opportunities for personalization.
And finally, customer interviews are one of the most accurate — but also most expensive — ways to uncover great insights about your site's performance.
Once you've investigated and found a number of opportunities for improvement, you need to prioritize them. It's not a good idea to start trying to fix every problem at once and create dozens of different campaigns. Instead, select the top three most important problems and create an optimization plan for each of those.
Alright, that's it for this lesson. Next time, I'm going to share some visitor segmentation best practices. I'll see you there!
